


In the Dark I Thought I Heard Somebody Call

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-02 12:08:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 10,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2811461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of thematic vignettes. ASZ, an arrival, a transition, a return, and what follows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. deep in the belly of the whale I found her

**Author's Note:**

> The title, chapter names, and inspiration are drawn from ["To the Dogs or Whoever"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rioOb9jWiPA) by Josh Ritter and will proceed along those lines.

She comes in with the fall. With the turning of the trees and the slow downward arc into winter. She comes in with the fall and the fading of the light, and she carries the light with her.

In the end he isn't surprised. Not really, not when he makes it through the initial crashing waves of utter astonishment. He bears up under them when they beat at him, when they pound him like the rhythm of his feet against the cracked pavement. They're calling out to him, trying to stop him, but he won't be stopped. His body has overtaken his mind, and his mind is just along for the ride. Reeling. Unable to process.

He saw her. Fucking. Die.

He's taking in pieces of her. Fragments. The afternoon sun on her hair, both pulled back and tangled. How worn her coat is, how patchy and spare. How she's staggering, almost stumbling, how she's so thin. The scars on her face. He sees the knife and the gun at her waist, and he sees the gleam of the charm around her wrist, and as he finds his place in front of her, between the barriers of burned-out cars, he sees her lips and the way they tremble.

And he figured all this out a long time ago.

Going to her is like tumbling into a gravity well. She has a density that pulls in the entire world; he always felt that she was somehow more _real_ than anything else around her. So his arms find her, find her shoulders, his hands her back, and even through the coat he can feel the fine angles of her bones, how there's not enough flesh between him and them. He's afraid he might break her, and he knows that's foolishness, but he's holding her so tight and lost in the center of the spectrum between laughter and tears. He's gone so far between them, so far around, that he's reached the place where they meet.

_Beth. Beth. Beth._

There are other voices. Other running feet. He hears Maggie. Someone is trying to pull him away and he's not letting them. If he lets go of her she might slip away from him. There's nothing left in the world but her. The only thing left in the world is her name.

He's on his knees and she has her hands in his hair, and his face is pressed against her, and he's shaking like an earthquake. Half a year ago his world fell apart. These are the pieces falling together again.


	2. running her hands through the ribs of the dark

Except it becomes very clear very quickly that not all of her has made it back.

There are some things she doesn't remember, or that she only remembers in fragments, glittering shards like a shattered window in her mind. There are some things she's clearly having difficulty holding onto, though she's trying. She's trying so hard, and he doesn't doubt her strength because not even death could stop her, but that doesn't mean she isn't struggling.

She remembers the hallway, but the sixty seconds before the bullet dropped her are gone. After, she remembers shifting lights and the sensation of movement, of warm and cold. She remembers being cold for a while - she remembers that much distinctly. She remembers the smell of grass, decay. She remembers voices, but not what they were saying. There's a long time after that's entirely blank. Not black, she says, when she closes her eyes and lays her head on Maggie's shoulder and tries to call it back. Just blank. No color. Not there.

She looks at Noah in utter bewilderment for about five minutes before she finds his name.

She knows Rick immediately, but she doesn't know _how_ she knows him, until he starts - gently - to provide her with a few stepping stones on which to proceed. He gives her the prison - she remembers that. He gives her the farm, before, and all of that comes back mostly complete. It seems that there's a point before which she's managed to keep almost everything and after which is shifting and unreliable, like a sand dune buffeted by constant wind. If her mind is terrain, all of that moves slowly across it, never quite the same from one moment to the next.

She has Maggie's name. She has all of that. She has all of her family, and he can see her holding it so close because she knows it can be an anchor. It can be a foundation on which she can begin to rebuild.

She cries, sometimes. She curls into the little bed they've given her in Maggie and Glenn's little house, and he stands in the doorway, silent - not every time but more times than they know - and he watches her stare out the window, tears rolling down her face, silent as he is.

He doesn't know if she knows he's there. It feels like she's far away. He thinks about watching her play, watching her sing - he stood there for a full fifteen minutes before he cleared his throat and she turned. He stood there and felt lost and tried to work things out. And he took a kind of guilty pleasure in looking at her without her being aware of it, seeing her with absolutely no pretense. Not that she ever had much of that.

He watches her now and he feels the sharp ache he always felt when she was crying and he didn't know what to do. It was a kind of deep panic, not frantic at all but so terribly helpless. He never really felt that way about anyone else, though he's never enjoyed seeing anyone in pain. Even when he was the one doing the hurting.

He wants to go in to her. He wants to do something. Before, in front of the gate, he held her so tightly but he hasn't done that since. He's afraid to, and she hasn't made any move toward him. Sometimes he's not sure she really sees him. Sometimes he thinks she might think he's a dream.

~

Here's what happened the first time she really met him again, when he sat with her, didn't touch her, wanted to desperately, and she looked at him and frowned, thinking, but somehow also distant.

Maggie, laying a hand on her shoulder. Glenn silent, leaning against the wall opposite. Rick in the door, arms crossed. He could have wished for less of an audience but he didn't know how to make them go away. This was something he should have had only with her. Even when he went to her outside the gate, there were people watching. People interrupting. The truth is he's become jealous of their time together.

Back on the road, Rick, gentle with him in a way no one else really is but still probing, still insistent. _So what happened? When you two were out there?_

Which was a tactful way of asking _What the fuck is wrong with you?_

_Why are you as dead as she is?_

So he looks at her and everything is clenched into his throat, and she looks back at him and murmurs _Daryl._

Everything slips out of him in a rush, his shoulders sagging, all relief, but then she speaks again.

_You were at the prison. You got out with the others? I think..._ Nothing after that. She shakes her head, and it's the worst thing in the entire world except for everything else.

Outside on the porch, watching people heading home from their work details, watching the lowering autumn sun, he holds his wrist with his other hand and digs his fingernails into the thin white scar there.

Digs them in until he bleeds.

~

So he tries to give it all back to her.

He starts from the beginning. She remembers the farm, she gets a little impatient with him, but he takes her out on the porch, with Maggie's permission he takes her on walks, and he tries to tell her what he needs her to know, what he really _needs_ her to find again. Because it has to be there. It just has to be. It can't be gone.

If it's gone he's not sure what he'll do, because she always carried the bulk of it and he's so tired. He was tired enough to die.

That's what he doesn't tell her. He leaves that part out. It takes a while for him to get to that point, the point he omits; he covers the period after the farm and the prison and after the prison. That's the hardest part, actually, even harder than what happened after the funeral home, because he's not sure how much to tell her about that, and because he still hasn't figured all of it out. What it meant.

For instance, he can't tell her about watching her play. He just can't do that. It hurts too much.

He can't tell her about what he said to her at the shack. He can't tell her about what he screamed at her. That hurts even worse.

But then, very near the end, they're sitting on a bench close to the wall and she seems to see something, though the light is getting dim, and she takes his wrist in her hand. He knows what's happening and he can't pull away, and it's terrifying, absolutely fucking terrifying, because she doesn't know him but she _knows_ him, in a way no one else ever has.

And he doesn't want to cry but he basically is.

He doesn't cover it. The beaded leather around her wrist rattles softly as she turns his hand in hers and looks at what he did to himself.

_I sure as hell. I sure as hell never._

He whispers _Don't._ He's pleading with her but though she's an angel of mercy part of her was always absolutely ruthless.

She traces her fingers over it. Back and forth. He's shaking now, and she doesn't seem to notice. Or she doesn't care. And he wants to be able to tell her that, like her, he didn't want to die. Well... He did, but not that way. He wanted to die but he didn't have the strength to do it himself. This was about something else. What he said to her. What he made into a weapon. How he saw her blood, before, how he tasted it on his lips when he carried her and it was so perverse, so twisted, but it was what he had. So later, how he had taken her knife and did what he did because maybe, half insane, he thought it might get him closer to her. Something. Blood was bright and solid and it ran through the world with all the reality and permanence of a great river.

Which are never permanent. Which never last. But it was something.

He can't explain it. He can't say anything. He lets her hold onto him, looks away while she examines the scar like she's trying to work out some kind of puzzle. Then - and he looks at this with horror and with despair and with a violent, burning hope - she takes off her leather beading and presses their wrists together and whispers

_you're like me_

She's still looking at their joined skin when he starts weeping in earnest, and he can't stop.

_oh my god my girl my girl_

Oh my God, my Beth.


	3. combed her hair with a blade did the maid of Orleans

But she has new things. She brought them with her like gifts.

She has her scars. The old ones and the new ones, and maybe he shouldn't look at them like gifts but after that one evening when she touched his and he didn't fight her off, that's how he sees them. He's not brave enough to touch the ones on her face, but what he would say if he had the courage is that he thinks they're beautiful, that they're _her_ , and though he hates whoever gave them to her, though he would kill them and thinks that perhaps he did, the scars themselves are something he very quickly grows to love.

Maggie can touch them. Right now, for the most part, Maggie is the only one she'll allow to touch her, at least very much. He understands this, and understands why that one time on the bench was an exception: _she_ touched _him_ and he did nothing to push her or pull her away.

Sometimes he wonders what happened to her to make her regard being touched in this way, and it frightens him, but really he thinks it's probably not so much trauma as her learning how to be in the world again.

But it's not just the scars.

He's practicing with a gun, because he takes guard duty on the walls on a regular basis and for that he can't use the crossbow, the retrieval of bolts being tricky at best. He's lining up bottles and taking them down, and after a short time he feels the pressure of a gaze and turns and she's watching him.

And of course he immediately wonders how long she's been there.

If she's trying to work something out.

She cocks her head, and he thinks both of a little bird, a little golden finch, and also of a young deer, ears pricked. Alert. She's graceful like a deer; he's thought this for some time now. She might seem gawky to anyone watching without truly seeing her, as if her limbs are still a little too long for her comfort, the manner of movement of a younger teenager. But really, it's not that. The awkwardness is a trick her body plays, without her really knowing it. It's something that leads people to believe she's weaker than she is. To underestimate her. That she's strong and fast, which he saw proved again and again, and he thinks he might be the only one who really knows.

It's a secret shared between them, except now she doesn't know it's shared.

She's still for another moment, and he's silent and waits to see what she'll do.

She pushes off the crate on which she's been leaning, comes to him and holds out her hand without a word. So he puts the gun into it.

Fifteen seconds later he's literally frightened by her aim.

It's almost inhuman. Her hands don't waver, as if she can completely solidify her muscles, lock down her body, halt every twitch of her lungs. She holds the gun and all six remaining bottles shatter, one bullet for each, and all in such rapid succession that he feels like it happens in the span of time it takes for him to exhale. It's like she's solving a problem. Hard and cool and fast.

He didn't know this secret. He had no idea.

So, though Maggie is reluctant and takes a few minutes to talk it over with Rick, that evening he takes her to the wall with him, and they sit in silence and he feels closer to her than he has since she touched his scar.

She's not a bird. She's not a deer. She's too lethal for either of those.

She's something else. Something all her own.

~

It's not just her aim. It's her knife.

She fights with the same kind of cool precision, the same kind of calculation, not a single hint of panic in it at all. No fear. She sees what has to be done and she does it, spins and stabs, slashes, makes a dance of it. Michonne observes and circles around her, guides her through certain moves, but there isn't much she actually has to do, not with this, and though she's all outward stillness and impassivity in her way, he can see the surprise.

And he can see, watching her, that she takes a kind of savage joy in it. In the killing she might do.

She told him it wasn't supposed to be fun. He's not sure what to say to her now.

Rick is standing beside him and lets out a long, low, impressed whistle. Carl is watching too, not saying much, and it's easy to see that he recognizes something here that no one else does, at least not in that way.

Children hardened by a world know that world like no adult ever can. And maybe she isn't a child now, but she was one when he met her, and about that he has no illusions.

~

One morning he's in the kitchen, bringing a message to Glenn about a run they need to make later on, and he sees her at the table, painting her fingernails. The lacquer is a hard, clean blue, almost the same shade as her eyes. On anyone else it might look delicate, but on her it looks like the sheen of steel, a reflected sky.

And that's when he knows he's afraid of her, a little, in an entirely new way.


	4. christ walked on water, we can wade through the war

They don't see the herd coming until it's on top of them.

He's not on duty. He's heading off duty, it's late, he's alone, even the streetlights are dim for the small hours, and the dark is why they miss it. Later they'll wonder - and they'll discover - why there were no flares from the sentries, no advance warning at all, because they aren't _idiots_ and they've thought of that, but it all fails. All of it. Everything.

He's halfway home to the place he's been sharing with Rick - with the vague intentions of finding something somewhere else at some point - when the first shots ring out, the first cries in the distance. All at once he isn't thinking because he doesn't have to; maybe some people's instincts have been dulled by weeks of relative safety, but not those of anyone in his group, and not his.

But there's one voice echoing in the back of his mind as he starts to run, grateful for the rifle still at his back. A soft whisper. It was never fully quiet, not in all those weeks of walking death, and it hasn't stopped whispering since she came back with the fall.

Her name. Her name is all that's left.

He'll go to the wall and he'll fight, he'll do what he has to do because these are his people and this is the home he's made, however strange and however ephemeral it feels, but he knows the truth that never stopped whispering to him and it's that after the prison fell he changed, he changed so much, and at the end of everything he'll let everything else burn for the sake of the beat of her heart.

There are words he still hasn't said to himself but they glow inside him like coals.

The whole zone is awake now. They have no sirens, no other form of loud alarm, because in a world where being conspicuous is a form of suicide they're already conspicuous enough. But word travels here. It travels quickly and quietly. So all around him are running feet, moving bodies, guns but not only guns. They won't just need people shooting. This is another way in which they aren't idiots, and it's part of why they're still here after so many other places like this have fallen.

They have walls. They don't expect those walls to stand on their own.

Two days ago a work detail covered the perimeter, located weak points, reinforced where reinforcing seemed indicated. Now that's good, now they're thankful for it, but from the sounds of the voices on the wall it also doesn't seem like what they did was enough.

And when he gets up there he sees it's not.

There are hundreds of them. Maybe more. The lights don't reach far and there is no visible end to them. They're a seething, reeking mass of sagging flesh and exposed bone, staring hungrily up with their blank milky marble eyes. They don't move like individual staggering bodies. They move like fluid. They move like a wave.

Just for a moment silence descends. Everyone is trying to take it in. Even the people who were here to begin with.

Sasha is to his left. He didn't notice her but now he feels her hand at his arm, not quite groping for him, and she's cradling her sniper rifle like a child and whispering _Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking Christ._

So the shooting starts.

Like the walkers, the gunfire doesn't seem to be made of individual shots, individual pieces one can pick out of the whole. It's a roar in his ears, and it recedes as he picks his targets and brings them down. They're falling, a lot of them are falling, but there are more and more and he sees with a vague sense of horror what other people see at the same moment, which is that the fallen ones are making a hill onto which the others can climb.

They're making a breaker for their own siege.

Below there's a crowd gathering, people bringing planks and poles to shore up the sections of the wall that are beginning to lean, but he can already tell, in the few seconds he spares to look, that it might not be enough. They're throwing everything they can at it and it might not be enough.

They're going to be overrun.

He supposes he should have guessed: this would end too. Everything always does.

_Not everything._ That voice again, quiet and insistent. His hands and eyes are moving to aim and fire completely without thought, completely on reflex, and the thing on which the bulk of his awareness is focused is the plan of the zone, the placement of the houses and streets, the other potential exit and entry points he knows about, and what it would take to reach them. How fast, how soon. What he might need. Whether he can get it in time.

He did this before, ran with only her. His people are here but he can do it again. He can do it again. He can leave them here to die if he has to. He can run over their bodies to reach her. He can be that selfish and that single-minded and that cold.

And yes, it does occur to him that enough of her remains that she might very well hate him for it. He thinks he could live with that if it means she stays alive.

More cries below, by the gates. Names he knows. He looks down and there's Rick, Michonne, Maggie and Glenn, and the gate is starting to buckle. Right on top of them. Others too, other faces and names he knows, but his attention is already narrow and now it's narrowing even further. Rick doesn't look panicked, none of them do, because all the panic in them burned away a long time ago. But he can see their eyes, even in the chaos, even at this distance, and he knows they know they're about to die.

And the thing is that if she's not dead, if she's here with him, what she gave him is also still alive.

The thing is that if she's not dead, he can be better than he thinks he can.

He uses the last of his ammunition on the walkers closest to them and then he's down from the wall, practically falling, his knife drawn. And he knows what he's doing.

He's been here before.

Two weeks after Grady they were cornered in a farmhouse, cornered bad, and everything was screams and groans and breaking glass, and the sound of shuffling meat and spilling guts, heads sheared away and bouncing to the floor like macabre children's toys. It was night then as well, and as he put himself at the front, made a wall of himself and the bow so the others could run out the back, he felt a kind of dark freedom he had never felt before. Not before the prison. Not after its fall. Not at his lowest point then did he feel anything of the kind, until she was gone.

Because she was close. She was in that darkness with him. He could feel her. He could feel her weight on his back. He was carrying her ghost. And it came to him with the clarity of the keenest revelation that he could go to her. He could do it. He could let the bow fall, open his arms and close his eyes and just...

Rick dragged him back, looped an arm around his chest and took him like he was made of air. He didn't fight. He saw the gleam of Michonne's blade and then he let himself slip away. And Rick didn't shame him later. Didn't make him talk about it. Didn't make him do anything. But Rick knew, and it was very clear, and he stayed close after that. Very close.

Rick had also seen the bandage on his wrist, and said nothing about that either.

This is why. This is why he's here. He owes them, he owes them everything; they're family and _family_ is everything. They didn't let him die when it was all he wanted to do, and that moment with her in the dark was a lie. If they hadn't saved him he would have never seen her again. So he'll save them now. If he can. And even if he can't... He's spent a lot of time, more time than he really even knows, thinking about what it might take to be worthy of her.

This might be okay.

And he sees the one coming for him. He knows it. He knows it in that final way, that complete way, the way that admits no doubt and feels only level recognition. He wonders, still shoving and stabbing and kicking away, whether she felt this way just before the bullet tore open her skull. He wonders whether she met it with such deep calm because she never saw it coming, or because she did and she was ready. She's always been a light, been a fire, been something he could follow and something he could carry, but in that moment she was ice.

He wishes he could be as calm as that. He wishes, in the end, that he'll get that death, the one he almost got before and that Rick took away from him. This is not like that, he's not trying to die; he'll fight until teeth take his flesh and he'll fight even after that, but he can meet it that way. And he doesn't have to save her.

She did and always will save herself.

There's a single shot, hard and clear as if it's ringing out in a silent winter forest, and the thing that was his death falls with its head in shattered pieces.

Everything around him is still, even if it's not. He looks up and she's there on the wall, directly above him, and she's haloed in firelight. Her hair looks like it's burning. The rifle in her hands looks like a spear, the scope flashes like gold, and he stares up at her and thinks _Valkyrie._

He smells it now, as if from far away: dead flesh, burning. The walls are not flammable, and further up and along people are pouring out precious gasoline, hurling matches. This is not an ideal solution but it's a solution, and the part of him that isn't completely focused on her can appreciate that. Rick's hand on his shoulder, saying something, but all he can see is her and her fire and her hair flying like a sunstorm, her grin, and the little salute she tips him before she goes back to her effortless slaughter of the dead.

There is no darkness here. There's all light, and she's in it with him.

All of her, reborn in the flames.


	5. love me like the crosses love the nape of the neck

There was one more time, before. There was one more time, before the house and the near miss in the dark, before the cut but not too long before, when the last bolt flew home. There are a lot of things he's put away, a lot of things he's locked up behind very thick doors, with very large locks. Since, he's begun taking them out again, not because the pain is gone but because the pain has changed.

But this is not one of those things. This thing stays locked away.

Fire brings it close. Fire means more than one thing. Before, it meant freedom, it meant the burning away of horses he didn't want to drag around anymore. But then it started to mean something else. Fire cleans but that's not all it does.

The part of him that it could really hurt is not particularly accessible. But that's changing. Even before the siege and the inferno that broke it, the locks were rusting away. Behind everything else, those doors were bending inward before any others did.

When he was very small he held the common belief that there were monsters in the closet. This thing that happened, that was the fire, that he remembers and can never forget, this final unbelievable loss... is not a monster. But it is a beast.

And no beast ever stays contained forever.

~

 

It's not yet dawn when things start to slow, start to clear.

They're all exhausted, many of them singed, burned, Michonne looks like she might be literally about to drop, and Maggie is supporting Glenn when things are finally calm enough for them to leave. Rest. The infirmary will be packed. The painkillers and antibiotics will be cut down to nothing. Some people will get no rest at all.

Some people won't be going home.

He doesn't leave. Not yet. He stands near the gates, hand on one of the poles holding them up, leaning. He can't really feel his arms, his legs, except that he hurts absolutely everywhere. This is a level of exhausted he's never felt before.

Except that's not true. He has. More than once.

The smoke is still rising, spreading the glow all around, but when he tips his head back, through it he can see stars. It's comforting somehow. Some ghosts have gotten very close now, but these are still there. They persist. The light of what he's looking at might be dead now but the light remains.

He hears a soft _Hey,_ and he looks down, and he's not surprised to see her standing in front of him. Before she looked like a wild machine, like something practically mythical in how she moved and how she fired, but now she just looks like her again, and she looks more like her than she has since she got here. The firelight throws the scars on her face into sharper relief - she's not sand dunes anymore but mountain ranges, high and rising higher as two continental plates come together.

More old things. She's a world.

He's in love with her, standing here and looking at her. He's hopeless with it, lost in it, and he has been for such a long time. He needs to just be honest about this, just get over it, because he's too tired to keep his hands around it like he has been. He's in love with her and it's not her ghost he carried away from Atlanta. It's that, that knowing, and the feeling of incompletion that went along with it.

He reached for her, he was so close, and she was taken away.

But now she's here, and _all_ of her is here. He can see it in her eyes. Uncertainty, a little, but that brightness, that recognition. The same girl he lost on the road and chased through the dark only to watch her die.

 _You alright?_ She's a little hesitant in how she says it, as if she isn't sure how he'll react, but he nods, pushes away from the pole, and winces as the pain in every part of him flares up again. She steps forward, touches his arm, and she feels so much smaller than him but he also knows how strong she is, and when she gets her shoulder under his arm he knows he can lean on her. She can bear him up.

His beautiful girl.

She helps him walk away.

~

 _I remember,_ she whispers to him, the dark closing around them, exhausted voices and low sobbing audible but in a state of removal, as if they're part of some other world that intersects the one in which they walk. _I mean... Yeah, you told me, I got that, but I really remember._ Her arm is wrapped around him and she squeezes him, and warmth rolls through him and for a few seconds it overwhelms the pain.

 _Still dunno what happened on the road but..._ She trails off, and there's a tightness in her voice that tells him what he needs to know. She remembers the hallway, yes, and she remembers more of it than she did, and she feels it as something that really happened to her.

 _You were holdin' onto me._ She whispers it. He feels it more than he hears. _You carried me out. It's... It's not all there. But I remember._

_Do you._

Yes, she remembers what he said at the shack.

_Do you._

Yes, she remembers the funeral home. She remembers all of it. It's all there. He was right. It was never gone. It was just a question of finding it again.

Finding her.

~

And at some point he realizes she's taken him back to his and Rick and Carl's place. They're standing in front of it and it's dark, and even looking at it, it feels empty. He stays for a moment and she's still supporting him, and he can't stop looking at the door like some kind of threshold. Like if he crosses it with her something will happen. Something he can't stop. It's dream logic, but then, that's sort of been how things have worked for a while now.

She's not a dream. She's warm and solid against him. She's going to carry him across it, and he has no more control over that than she ever did.

For some reason he looks up again at the stars. He never did that, when he was with her after the prison. Not even after things got better. Somehow he just never cared.

 _C'mon._ A gentle nudge, a tug, like she always used to do. She knew just how hard to push him, just how hard to pull. _C'mon inside._

He goes with her.

He's talking to her as she helps him to his room - she knows it, she's been here before very briefly, though she was never inside. It's spartan, nothing there but his bed and his gear, because nothing else really matters. He's talking to her, asking her more questions, and she's answering him with all the patience she ever possessed. She remembers the country club. She remembers the running, all the running. She remembers the meadow, lying beside him, gasping, too exhausted to move.

She remembers. She remembers how she knew him. He wants to grab her, pull her close, hold on like he did that first day, feel the angles and lines of her against him, but somehow he's still afraid. Of her. Of what might happen.

So when she leaves him in the bathroom with the shower running he lets out a huge breath, leans against the door, doesn't try to stop his shaking. The same under the spray, his forehead against cool tile, letting the flesh and blood that covers him wash down the drain. Wash away. He can be cleansed. He can be a new thing.

He can be better.

~

She's still there when he goes back into his room.

He doesn't expect that. For a few seconds he's not sure what to do. He's naked except for the towel around his waist. Weeks on the run together and somehow he managed to never let her see him like this. She's sitting on the bed and she stares at him and he stares back, and neither of them move.

He shakes his head, slow, the hand gripping the towel so tight that it hurts, and what he's thinking and can't say is that she shouldn't be here, this is what he was afraid of, her here and him like this and weeks and weeks of hurting and waiting and wanting her, wanting her in so many ways, in ways he didn't even understand. Horrible dreams, guilty dreams, dreams from which he woke trembling with tears hot on his face. Dreams from which he woke aching with how much he needed her, aching like he never did for anyone else in his life. Aching and _hard_ and God, how could he, how could he, she was _dead_ and how could he. Confused because that just didn't happen to him. Disgusted with himself.

Alone with it. Who could he tell? Not Carol. Not Carol.

It might have been her, but not Carol.

One more thing he hasn't told her. One of the last things. He hasn't touched it, has used her to bury himself and hide. It's a hole between them, gaping and dark and awful and somehow she hasn't gone there. And he shouldn't be feeling that now, of all times and in all places. That particular ghost should not be here.

This is not the first time he's wanted to cut and run.

 _Go home,_ he says and turns away from her, and he knows what she'll see there and he just doesn't fucking care anymore. _I need to sleep._

She doesn't move. _People are missing,_ she says quietly, and he squeezes his eyes shut and thinks _Christ, no._ But she goes on. Ruthless girl. She's always had a sharp edge about her that hardly anyone else ever saw. _People are gone._

But she leaves it at that. She doesn't ask. Is that mercy?

Or has she just hit the same wall he has?

He won't look at her. But he hears her moving, leaving maybe, he thinks _Oh thank God,_ and that's when he feels her hands on him, on his back, tracing the lines that were beaten into him, and he almost screams. It closes up his throat. He doesn't want this. He doesn't want any of this. He had no idea what it would mean, if the world twisted sideways like this. He should have known he had changed too much, lost too much, and he still doesn't know how she became who she is.

So maybe this works. Maybe somehow it does.

She's a gravity well. She pulls him in.

He doesn't know if she pulls him back to the bed or if he pushes her there. He doesn't know where these instincts are coming from, how they're rising if they've been buried for so long, but she changed him. She did. So she shoves the towel away and he gets her shirt off so roughly he hears it tear, but he's careful with her, terrified, when he presses her back, when he runs his hands down her body and she arches up into that touch and lets out a sound he's never heard before. He has a knee between her thighs. She's dragging her palms up his back, where he's never let anyone touch him since it happened. He's breathing so hard, he feels like a monster, the house might not be empty for much longer, but she's holding him there and she's not letting him go.

This has gone so far beyond _bad idea._ This left the very concepts of _good_ and _bad_ behind about fifteen exits back.

So really it's okay.

_Wait._

There's still light. He can still see her. He pulls back, braced over her, lays a hand against her face. _Wait._ It shouldn't go like this. It's not like he has no control; that was and is and always has been a lie. With his thumb he strokes across the scar on her cheek, lifts his hand and traces the one on her forehead. Slow. Very slow.

Not the other one. He can't. Not yet.

She closes her eyes. Lies still. And for a moment the terror takes him again and he thinks maybe she doesn't want him to but she sighs, closes her hand around his wrist, turns it to her mouth and presses her lips to his palm.

So yes. It's okay.

He pushes back. She sits up, slow. She looks a little dazed. She looks at him. It's harder, now, to let her look, but he can. He can do that. He lowers his head, doesn't meet her gaze, and doesn't quite let himself see what he was just touching. The slight curve of her waist - lean and hard with muscle now. The small swells of her breasts beneath the fabric of her bra. He's so much more naked than she is but he just can't quite look.

It's still something like firelight and that hurts so much.

 _It's alright._ She's pushing up onto her knees, reaching for him, and he manages not to pull away. She takes his hand, lifts it, lays it over her breast, and the breath he drags in and lets out again is huge and trembling. _It's alright. You can._

He's been waiting for so long. He doesn't want to wait anymore.

It's not like it started. It feels like it takes hours; it feels equal to the span of time he's been without this, when the world was a held breath. He can. He can, slow as she strips herself, laying his mouth over her scars, over all of them, with her hand combed into his hair and her breathing as shaky as his. He can, his hands on her bare breasts, her sides, taking her hips. He's exploring her and she's pressing up into it, opening herself up to it, sighing his name. He settles between her legs, she settles her hands on his arms, and he just feels her, breathing her in with his lips pushing hers apart. Beneath him. Against him.

She reaches between them and takes him in her hand and he has to squeeze his eyes closed, duck his head against her neck, try not to whimper. Try not to cry. It still hurts. In some ways it hurts worse.

He was never supposed to have this. It was never supposed to happen. There are so many _supposed tos_ and _shouldn'ts,_ and he doesn't think either of them have the patience for them anymore, because the world can end in so many more ways than one.

Pushing into her is like diving into fire.

She cries out when he does. He's afraid, afraid he's hurting her, afraid she doesn't actually want this, but she hooks her legs over the back of his, lifts her thigh against his hip, opens herself up wider and rolls herself up and gasps _please, please._ And he can't say no to her. 

He never could.

His eyes are open when he comes, when his body bends like a bow, and he sees her lifting herself up with him and dragging him through it, her head thrown back with the dawn catching her hair, and her face...

He could die now. He could just die. Death has followed him around for such a long time, and the truth is that she can't protect him from it. The truth is that she can't protect herself. None of them can. They've all lost so much.

But there's this. There's this. Pain bleeds into pleasure and back again, and he presses his face into the hollow of her throat, and she holds him and murmurs things to him that he can't hear and doesn't need to.

Without meaning to, his fingertips are tracing her scars again. Her arms still around him, hers are tracing his. Over and over.

_you're like me_


	6. lemonade on your breath, sun in your hair

The morning crawls by. He isn't sleeping, not quite. Neither is she. They float in and out together, tangled up in each other, warm and silent. He's still hurting, hurting worse since the end of the fighting, but she seems to have the qualities of the better painkillers, which is to say that she doesn't so much erase the pain as make it not matter.

It's getting on to winter and the sun is low, pale. But it lights her up. He comes back to it again and again, and maybe she might get bored of it if he ever actually talked to her about it, but he's never been able to think of her apart from light. Lying beside her, running his fingertips from her collarbones down over her breasts and ribs to her hips, he thinks of the farm and how he barely noticed her then, being distracted by other things. But his understanding of her works backward. It remakes his memories in its own image. So it seems to him that she's always been lit by something from somewhere else.

Maybe this is what love does. Maybe it makes you absolutely fucking psychotic.

Definitely not the worst thing that's ever happened to him.

As the time rolls in and the sun gets higher, he can hear Rick and Carl moving around the house, footfalls and quiet, tense voices. But they don't disturb him, don't knock. He wonders if they know. It occurs to him that if they did, Rick at least would probably not be surprised. He never really got an answer to _What the fuck is wrong with you_ but Rick isn't stupid. Rick hasn't made it this far by being oblivious.

They let him be. Let _them_ be. If Maggie is worried, comes looking, he can hope for the running of some interference. Both of them being gone, perhaps someone will be able to do the math regardless of what Rick says or doesn't say.

It's possible he's overthinking some things.

She stirs, turns in his arms, turns toward him, and he stops thinking at all for a while.

It's slower this time, slow and very quiet. She takes his hand, pulls it between her spread legs, and shows him how to do what she likes. She's so patient she takes his breath away. She presses her fingers over her mouth to muffle her moans, and he tugs her hand aside and kisses her as he slips his fingers into her, uses them to fuck her deep and gentle. And it's not complicated. He's never done this but it's not complicated. She makes it very clear what she wants, what she needs from him, and he rocks himself against her hip, looking for friction, needing her right back.

This works. It works very well.

But it's aching. That pain is still there in the background, that sense that - no matter how slow and pleasure-soaked this is and no matter how much he loves her - this is an act of defiance, a strike against something. This is making a point.

And they both had to lose almost everything for it to be possible.

A little later, she whispers a question. Her hand is still curled around him, slick with his come - this is messy and a bit clumsy and maybe that's exactly how it should be. And so is her question, blunt, all hard corners. She throws it at him, though her voice is so soft.

_Was it worth it?_

He doesn't have to ask her to specify. There's no specification necessary. After the prison they found a kind of innocence, dug it out of a grave with their joined hands. But they lost it. There was fall after fall, and she came back with the fall even if she also brought the light, and they've both changed. They can't be who they were.

_You gotta stay who you are._

But we can't. We can't ever do that. Because it keeps changing and it doesn't stop.

He doesn't know if it was worth it, which is awful. It should be easy to say. Her with him after all this time, her hands on him and lacing fire into his nerves, it should be worth everything. Wasn't he sure he would die for her? Wouldn't he do that now?

But it's not an easy question. He closes his eyes and turns his face into the pillow, and he doesn't answer.

There are some things he still hasn't said. There are some questions she still hasn't asked. It's winter and the light is dying. He can't escape the feeling that they're both running out of time.

~

Later, helping repair the walls. They aren't talking much. The air smells like acrid smoke and cooked meat - not the appetizing variety - but the sun is bright. Even a little warm. The walls aren't as badly damaged as they looked in the dark. They can rebuild. They aren't going to lose what they have here. Not yet.

Once, in a fit of forward-looking honesty, before half of their numbers were carved away, he asked Carol about the future. He can think about that now, though it burns him. He asked her about what she wanted, if what she wanted was something she could have. He was still walking like a dead man, but maybe like a dead man who was starting to resurrect himself. Not whole, not the same, but someone who might be able to keep moving independent of habit.

He asked her, and she didn't look at him. She didn't answer, not right away, and he realized that he had been so buried in himself that he had neglected her entirely, and that hurt. He had almost forgotten her, and that was horrible. Forgotten that he still had her, that it was something. Forgotten, until she gave him the space he needed to return to her.

_You remember how I said we don't get to save people?_ She looked at him and his throat closed up, and all he wanted to do was grab her and hold on, because he recognized what he saw in her eyes.

She was slipping. He was coming back and she was slipping again. Going, and he couldn't reach her. Wasn't close enough.

_We don't get futures anymore, Daryl. We just keep going until we stop._ She shook her head. _Sorry. I know that's not what you need to hear._

That night he dreamed about drowning in deep black water. He could see the shore, could see a light, high in the darkness. A tower. A lighthouse. If he could place himself in the path of its beam, someone would see him. Would come for him. But he couldn't.

God, though, he was trying.

_Give me a reason. Don't let me fuckin' die out here._

That was when he knew. Her blood on the bathroom floor. How part of him had thought that was so pathetic, _opting out._ And part of him understood. The momentary weakness. The strength it took to claw yourself out of that grave.

She saved herself. He had to do the same.

Over and over.

~

There's a point, that evening, where he has enough.

It's not dusk yet. The work isn't done; they'll have more to do tomorrow. But he's so tired still, and she's standing close, all of her caught by the sinking sun. For a moment the hardness is gone from her, even her scars don't seem as deep, and she's the girl he met at the farm, the girl who sang by the fire, who sang in the prison in the dark, who sang about _being good,_ about how _they could be good_ as he lay in a dead man's bed. And he believed her. He really did.

We can't stay who we are. Sometimes we have to be who we were.

He takes her by the shoulder, pulls her to him, cups the back of her head with his hand. He knows where his fingers are. He hasn't seen it, hasn't tried, has barely been able to think about it. But it's there. Made a hole in her. Changed her. Changed them both.

The seasons are turning around again. Maybe they don't get futures. But he covers her, tangles his fingers in her hair, and kisses her and doesn't care who sees it. Kisses her with tears running down his face.

_If we can be who we'll be together. Oh my sweet girl, if we just get that much._

This place is not safe. But it's a place.


	7. you don't have to tell me who the fire is for

_Tell me._

He won't. Even though he feels like he needs to. Even though he wants to. This is also part of being tired - of everything he's been carrying, her ghost hasn't been the only thing. She knows that. That's why she said what she said, about putting it away. _Or it kills you._ Does it, though? He's not so sure. There are times when he genuinely thinks he needs that weight, because it's something to have when everything else is gone.

With her, he had been ready to carry it forever.

_Love you for the rest of my life._

But he can't tell her. Not that. So he doesn't.

~

They sleep in the same bed now, every night. No one questions it. People are used to strange couplings, especially in the Zone, and no one is in the habit of judging. Not even his own people; he was right about most of them not being surprised. Not even Maggie. They saw what happened after Grady. What he was like. Things add up, if you let them do so. You arrange the pieces and you see where they fit.

It's not even a question of whether or not he's good for her, good enough, except for him that's one of the biggest questions. A question that swallows everything else.

She sings to him. He doesn't have to ask her for it. He lies with his head in her lap and she strokes his hair and sings to him. Even her voice is different now - not worse in any way but just different. Older. Slightly rougher in a way that makes it even sweeter. She sings old songs about hills and wildfires, tragic love. Murder ballads. In her voice, these aren't disturbing.

_I begin to think what a deed I'd done_  
 _I grabbed my hat and away I run_  
 _made a good run but a little too slow_  
 _they overtook me in Jericho_

There's one, one he specifically requests, which he otherwise never does. One that strikes at something in the core of him, hurts in a way he wants more of. Coming from her, it sounds right. It sounds like someone is trying to tell him something.

_you been whipped by the forces that are inside you_  
 _come on up to the house_  
 _you're high on top of your mountain of woe_  
 _come on up to the house_  
 _you know you should surrender but you can't let go_  
 _you gotta come on up to the house_

She sings on into the winter. They're all aging with it. Carl is getting harder, quieter. Soon Judith will be old enough to begin to understand the world into which she's been born. But this _is_ a future. Them. All of this. The seasons don't turn without one. Not without the rise and fall of her voice, not without her heartbeats to mark the time.

~

And they do mark the time.

He remembers that they tried, for a while, but it slipped away. They knew when it was getting colder, warmer; they had a general sense of how time was proceeding. But dates bled away. Keeping days of the week felt pointless. No day held much connection to any other, not when the singular goal of all those days was simply to get through them.

But here, in the Zone, those markers have returned. In this way they've recovered the future, because the world is more than _now._

This is the longest night of the year.

They set a bonfire. It's not a good idea, because it might draw walkers and it might draw more than that, but knowing the day and what it means has made everyone a little reckless, and you can't live entirely on being careful. They set it in the center of the Zone and everyone comes to see. They bring food, a stereo; kids kick a soccer ball around. Ordinarily it might seem like foolishness bordering on insanity, but no one here has any illusions about what this really is. They can't live like this. This is one grab for some sense of who they were before they return to the work of being who they are.

He keeps his distance. It's big enough that it unsettles him intensely. Because of that one night back on the cusp of the winter, yes, but not only that. The locks in his mind growing dangerously brittle. And when she finds him, he knows what's going to happen.

And maybe it's time.

 _'s fun,_ she murmurs, and leans against him. Without thinking, he slides an arm around her waist, and that's a good thing. _We don't get enough of that._

He grunts something that might be agreement. No, they don't. Maybe they should also redefine their sense of what _fun_ means. But she glances at him, all lit up the way she always is, her eyes bright.

_Rick was looking for you._

He shakes his head, just a little. _He needs to find me, he will._

Her mouth twists as she fully turns her head, looks up at him. _There's a lotta ways you didn't change, Daryl Dixon._

This is true. Whether it's a bad thing or not is an open question.

Quieter. Hardly audible at all over the music, something pounding he doesn't much care for. Voices. Hers, under all of them, and when she's this close he can feel it in his chest, vibrations traveling frame to frame.

_When are you gonna tell me._

It's not a question. It's more of a statement. And because of that, it cracks open the last lock and he takes her hand and pulls her into the darkness.

~

There was a fire. No one set it. It was just there.

It tore through the woods, moving downhill like a wave. They should have known how close it was, but they were already running when its proximity became clear. By then it was too late. They cut to the side but they were closed off. Turned again and found that way blocked as well. There was smoke, burning all the moisture out of his eyes. He was trying to see the others, and he heard screams. Terror.

He never thought it would end that way. Some other way, sure. Starvation, slaughter by other people, walkers. There were any number of ways it might happen. But not this.

He lost sight of them. Found them again. Tore on through with them, his hand searching for Carol's and finding it. Pulling her. Filled with the horrific certainty that she didn't want to be pulled. He screamed that he would carry her if he had to, even though he knew and she knew it would kill both of them.

It was too much. He survived. When he shouldn't have done, he survived, he outlasted everything the world hurled at him. But this was going to break him and he wasn't going to be able to come back. She had to know that. She couldn't do this to him.

He was losing the others again. Falling behind. He could feel the heat at his back, could smell his own burning hair. He heard cries, and they weren't calls to the others or only terror now.

They were agony.

 _No, no._ If he cried the tears would steam off his cheeks. He turned back to her, intending to sling her over his shoulder, and that was when she gave him a huge shove, more strength than he knew she had in her, and he stumbled, ran, plunged forward under his own momentum and the extra she gave him and the deeper certainty that if he didn't go he was failing her.

And he was so fucking angry.

He was so fucking angry for such a long time.

He held onto that, once they counted their numbers and knew what and who they lost, because it was a feeling. It was a little flame, burning in him. Fury. It was something to push him on. Like her hand at his back.

He could have taken it. Gone into that light with her. It would have been over.

It might have been worth it.

~

She's quiet for a long time. They're standing by the wall, beneath a space between posted guards. No one will see them, no one will hear them. He doesn't look at her, and though her hand is brushing his, she doesn't fold their fingers together.

_We go on 'cause we have to._

He does look at her then. There's a moon, high and full, and it catches her eyes. Her hair is white in its light. He thinks of her suddenly as an old woman, beautiful and terrible, and knows she might live to be that but he won't live to see it.

It's the longest night of the year. It's a night for setting fires and telling tales, for beating against the dark. But it's also a night for letting things go. Those fires should be allowed to burn everything else away. He lays a hand against her jaw, tilts her head up, kisses her so slow and so long he forgets to breathe. She laces her fingers through each other at the nape of his neck and holds on.

She came with the fall and brought fire with her.

This is the longest night of the year, the deepest darkness. But now, he thinks, now the world is spinning back toward the sun.

_Now we're into the light._

_~_

She comes in with the spring.

He sees her from the wall. He knows her instantly. Her stooped shoulders, her weariness. Since he met her she's been tired; they had that in common, along with so many other things. Like him, he can see she's changed, and it's clearer every second as he tears toward her, the gate open behind him and the people he practically ran over to get out standing there astonished.

He can see how she's changed. She limps. There are scars, thick ones, twisted and knotted around her face and neck. Just one more thing that brings them all together.

He saw her fucking die. But he didn't, not really, and he no longer trusts what he sees.

He falls against her and she drops her gun, curls her arms around him and holds on. This is what he trusts. He hears voices, running feet. Voices he knows. But one of them in particular, close, laughing in a kind of wonder. Musical. Clinging to them both.

She might have always believed, he thinks. She's the only one who could, this beautiful strange girl made of fire, this girl he loves forever.

 _We ain't ashes._ No, we aren't.

We're made of light.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end. Those of you who came along for this ride and left very kind comments, thanks so much for doing so; it's fantastic to know that people enjoy this thing. Especially since I had to write it just so it would leave me alone. 
> 
> The two songs from which I drew lyrics for this chapter are ["Little Sadie"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fk4uBgPSPc), which is a 20th century American folk song of unclear origin. I'm linking to the version by Crooked Still because it's my favorite. The other is ["Come On Up to the House"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUE-ic_Q0g4) by Tom Waits from his album _Mule Variations._
> 
> The soundtrack for this last chapter was Tycho's ["See".](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFOPkLihFvc)
> 
> I've been asked whether I'll record an audio version of this thing like I have with my other stuff. The answer is maybe. The primary constraint is length and how much space I have in my Soundcloud account. No idea how many people would even be interested in that, but I really like reading aloud so I might give it a try. 
> 
> Thanks again, guys. This was fun. Weird, but fun. Or weird AND fun, they sure as hell aren't mutually exclusive.


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